Taliban Impostor Is the Latest in String of Afghan War Missteps

(Nov. 23) -- It would be a good joke were there anything funny about it. Nearly 10 years into the United States' war in Afghanistan, the Afghan government agreed to hold peace talks with the enemy and wound up sitting down with an impostor.

The New York Times reports:

For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.

But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.

The man who duped NATO is just the latest in a string of missteps that have colored the war in Afghanistan, beginning with Osama bin Laden's escape from Tora Bora. The Washington-backed Afghan government was fraudulently elected and remains staggeringly corrupt. Recently, President Hamid Karzai admitted receiving bags of money from Iran, the United States' chief foe in the region. Karzai seems to be hedging his bets and increasingly turning away from Washington to prepare for the (likely bloody) aftermath when U.S. troops leave, however many years down the road that may be.

Meanwhile, 92 percent of Afghan men have never heard of the 9/11 attacks nor understand just what, exactly, American troops are doing in their country. But today it appears that Afghan ignorance has been trumped by Washington's.

Read more at The New York Times.

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